Research Call Topics

Research and Sense-Making
1

I’ve volunteered to lead the Research Group call on the 18th of April and I’d like to get an idea what would people prefer to hear about.

I’m working on a number of research projects and they all have the same overarching theme. The projects themselves are quite distinct and different though, so I’ll introduce them briefly here and you let me know what (if anything) might be of interest.

  1. Interfaces without Implementation
    This is a part of a wider project that sees everything in the society as a system, its relationships and participants. Systems come into being through the process that roughly contains these elements: Event → Motivation or frustration → potential solution → design → implementation.

Everything that is wrong in the system (and society) is defined as System Corruption - and then we have a classification of the types of corruption, methodology how to determine objectively if the system is corrupt or not, etc…

Interfaces without Implementation is bringing software paradigm into societal sphere. It’s the idea that we can visualise the society/institutions/organisations through their specifications and their behaviours and execution paths can be defined as explicitly stated “interfaces”. That’s the functionality explicitly claimed to be supported. If you imagine a decision tree - every branch is a different route you can take in order to reach a certain outcome. I propose that there’s a great deal of “mystification” going on here and that we’re very good at designing “empty” implementations without knowing whether they adhere to the specifications or even if the implementation exists at all.

Then it goes into systems “user manuals”, blindspots, testability and ultimately accountability.

There’s a proposal for how to “force” the accountability onto the social structures and how to make testability a regulatory requirement…

  1. Social Capital
    This is an attempt to look into relationships between people that go beyond superficial to make them “meaningful”. The premise is that individuals are increasingly alienated and engaged in zero sum game thinking and only 2 people (usually in a romantic relationship) can form strong, non-exploitative and synergetic relationships.

The research is about the methodology, protocols and structures to facilitate more than 2 people getting into these “interest groups”, based on love for each other.

I’ll then define social capital and its challenges, potentials and examples.

  1. Elitist Theory

A research into social change and transformations. It posits that a small minority of people - elites - hold the most power in society, and they dominate decision-making, regardless of democratic processes or popular will.

This feeds into Bourdieu and Gramsci in terms of hegemony and mystification and re-production of hierarchies, but the Elitist theory is most commonly associated with the work of Pareto, Mosca and C.Wright Mills.

The suggestion would be that instead of building grassroots movements - it should be done top down - bring the elites in first…

  1. 3rd Places

Similar idea to deliberately developmental spaces but concerned with relationships between people, life meaning and social capital.

3rd places already exist - they come under anything that’s not 1st place - home, 2nd place work. Traditionally, it would have been a barber’s, a cafe, bar, church. Place where people go to socialise, bond, cohere and co-create…

We need to re-invent them because they are directly linked to existential crisis and life meaning…

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2

Let’s include Peter Turchin as well.

I don’t necessarily see elite vs grassroots as an either/or. But the cultural complexity needed to form and appeal to elites is different than what works with the grassroots. How elites and grassroots relate to one another is also a rather vital question.

3

Can we tie this into Habermas’s work on the public sphere?

4

Culture, religion, tradition, etc. The things that modernity supposedly left behind.

5

I’d be touching on Oldenburg, Claud. Fischer, Nan Lin and Habermas, of course.

6

Yes, but my position is that social capital has been under-utilised throughout the history.

7

Great to see the forum used, as here, as a place to float ideas for the research group calls, so thanks @Martin

I am in wholehearted agreement with the general principle that people with a research interest are welcome to bring up their topics or fields of interest, and perhaps to find others to share their interest, or even collaborate if there is sufficient alignment.

For me this brings up a wider question: how, and when, is the best way and time to bring these up? I don’t have any clear answer.

What is clearer to me, just in the context of this particular thread, is that here we can mention ideas, but if we want to start actual conversations around the subject matter, I would enjoy it if a separate thread were opened for each different topic, so that we can engage with what we have time and energy for.

8

Thinking about this from the POV of online knowledge management, there are a few different strategies.

One idea is to be content-driven and departmentalized like a traditional university (e.g. “economics”, “psychology”, “education”). Of course, that sort of silo model, IMO, is part of the problem liminal spaces like 2R emerged to solve.

Another idea is to be project-centric. Anything related to co-housing could go in one bucket. Relational practices in another, etc.

Or go with big meta-themes and sort things out that way: “evolution”, “consciousness”, “personal development”, etc.

Or finally, just go with at full-on chaotic emergence model and let attractors coalesce and attract without any special intervention.

My “day job” is heavily departmentalized. I got involved with liminal spaces like 2R to bust out of that particular conceptual jail. Forums like this lend themselves to theoretical discussion. That’s a jail of its own, however, but to bust out of that one involves logging off occasionally and living in the physical world. I simply can’t imagine a theoretical fix for being overly theoretical!

9

Thanks @RobertBunge for your setting out some very reasonable strategies for classifying knowledge. And indeed, this kind of knowledge compartmentalisation has been around for centuries within academia, shifting gently but without any radical change in form as far as I can see.

I start from the recognition that the world is so complex that there is vast scope to chop it up in different ways. While some people will be content with the categorisation that is handed down to them in their cultural tradition, others will prefer their own take, and perhaps be labelled as “interdisciplinary” or “transdisciplinary” by those in the normal silos. Personal ontology (and epistemology) seems to me likely to be closely linked to @Martin 's “existential crisis and life meaning”.

A relatively recent development is the interest in bioregional or place-based knowledge, where the watersheds dividing knowledge are placed differently again. And not to forget indigenous traditions, that are often related.

With all this in mind, my personal approach is not to try to create any kind of overall classification of knowledge. I like to start from two simple bases: the desire to live together or work together. I don’t see this as random as “full-on chaotic”, though I do see it as in a sense emergent — emergent for the people involved.

Here in this forum I do see it as up to the individuals concerned to define what they themselves see as a topic, with its boundaries. What I would love to see is different people engaging, and gradually morphing the topic boundaries to focus around areas of shared concern — areas where those people could potentially work together, even if the “work” is initially desk research, or just writing thought-pieces. Perhaps the whole area of conscious co-living is yet more challenging?

I’ll leave it there for the time being: hope you can come to the Ontological Commoning conversation tomorrow, which for me relates to all this.

10

All sounds really interesting, but personally I’d be most interested in hearing more about 1 as it’s the least familiar to me of the options.

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11

A bit late, considering the call is on Friday, but I think I would be most interested in topic 2 and 4. As it relates to topic 2, I would definitely be interested in discussing the topic of social capital as it relates to ‘resonance’ as discussed in Rosa, if you are familiar, perhaps especially as these relationships relate to ‘time’. How can we experience time differently together?

On topic 4, the topic could go in so many different directions I’d be interested in whatever direction feels appropriate. Maybe we can even do an exercise: what are the ‘third places’ that we ourselves frequent, and how do they feel to us? How do we engage with them, ‘who’ are we in these spaces, how is this feeling different from the other spaces we are apart of?

12

Sorry Matthew, it looked to me like people wanted to hear about Interfaces Without Implementation. We can always cover the stuff that you’re personally interested in separately or maybe a future research call.

13

Sadly I’ve realised I won’t be able to make the call this Friday as I’m travelling (so feel free to ignore my preferences here!)

14

Interfaces without implementation is a pretty standard computer science topic. It’s part of loosely coupled, object-oriented design. The idea is Item 1 wants to be able to send information to Item 2. Instead of spelling out exactly how that is going to work , in the design of the Item 1 there is essentially a placeholder for the future interface that will be able to communicate with Item 2. Then build the details of Item 1 assuming that interface will be worked out in due course.

A human metaphor might be something like a design for a Global Republic (along the lines of Kant’s Perpetual Peace). Assume there will be an interface in which the US and China will have constructive, mutually intelligible communications. Assume similar interfaces binding other nations. Then work politically now, in the absence of that future implementation, as if that implementation is going to exist.

Here is how it works in CS already: Code Against Interfaces, Not Implementations | by Nick Hodges | Better Programming

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15

My research is around explicit and implicit interfaces, spec drift, debugging, surfacing contradictions, systemic corruption and creating tension in the system

16

Is that from a CS or engineering angle? Or more from a social or hybrid systems angle?

17

This is purely about social systems and I argue that it’s essential to view social structures/institutions as systems because it reveals symbolic vs functional behaviour, promise vs implementation, makes incoherence technically precise and the rich vocabulary that’s directly transferrable - like - “patch” - superficial reform that doesn’t fix core problem, “race condition” - competing interests causing breakdown, etc…

I also push for establishing principles of “demanding” coherence, accountability, testability…